IPCC Legal Notice

The Legal and Liaison Officer of the IPCC has sent me a boilerplate notice, requesting the removal of Secret Santa leak documents from my website.

click to enlarge

It’s an odd world when a communication from a Legal and Liaison Officer ends with: “do not print this e-mail unless absolutely necessary.”

I didn’t pay much attention to the United Nations before I began researching the climate debate. I’m not sure I’d ever heard of the World Meteorological Organization, the UN entity that houses the paid, head office staff of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – see the photo here.

Lately I’ve begun to view the UN as a vast, unaccountable, bossy bureaucracy. One whose employees imagine they have a right to lecture you about your e-mail printing habits when contacting you about an entirely unrelated topic.

If you click the image above it will enlarge and you can read the notice I’ve received. It says that documents released via the Secret Santa leak are “not for public distribution” and requests that I remove them from my website. Which probably means it’s a good idea for those of you who are seeding the torrent to keep your clients open a while longer.

But really, the cat is out-of-the-bag. The damage is done. Thousands of copies of these documents are now out there. They can’t be recalled.